Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Just FYI to everyone - I'll be on the raid warning podcast October 12th, as part of a general druid roundtable. I'm really excited to be a part of it and getting to talk with folks like Astrylian, Graylo and Lissanna.

If you have questions that you'd like raised, please send them in! I'll do my best to answer them. You can submit questions by calling in or emailing raid warning.

I'm going to try and talk about the direction ferals are going in Cataclysm, the general lack of...anything about ferals in the beta so far and what I think that means, and some ideas for how to get started in 4.0.1 without killing yourself. If you'd like to know more, let me know!

15 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Wow can't wait to hear it!

I'd love to hear what you have to say about the niche/strength/advantages of feral tanks will be in Cataclysm. I still feel ferals lack that utility advantage while in bear form and (without knowing the new content) with defense rating changes, the big damage, big health, bruiser niche will be less desirable.

Kitty isn't so bad imo. Looking at some of the upcoming gear too on MMO Champion it appears that future gear will provide the stats (Lots of Agility) need to normalize the lack of DPS stemming from the removal of Armor Pen. If this isn't enough then perhaps a general buff of DPS is needed. I ran a dungeon yesterday on the PTR with a bunch of well geared people and I did around 9k DPS single target with only a Kings, MoTW, Blackened Dragonfin, and a Flask of Endless Rage.

ALSO

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/60287/stormriders-raiment/

Looks like with the 4 pc we might be adding 3 mangles into our rotation. That is if having the 4 pc is viable at all.

Lastly! lol. FFF has changed. Not sure if you know this, but when applied it seems to have 3 stacks each containing a 4% decrease in armor. Not sure yet on how these stacks are removed. On the PTR it just says 3 stacks, and the tooltip reads 12% armor reduction. And throughout the duration of the fight the 3 stacks stay up.

Logique, was this the PTR for 4.0.1? If so was this including trash? Bottom line is go on the PTR for 4.0.1 and fight Saur or anothe ICC boss. then compare those DPS results with what you have now on live. I will be shocked if they are more then half of what you do today. this isn't just me saying this but you can find tons of logs and dps posts ont he forums and at EJ showing it.

Finally are we just to stop playing form 4.0.1 till cata release then? Or have to wait till level 85?

I have a Cata theory that I'd like to hear discussed a bit, although, it might not be appropriate for your upcoming show.

In short, my hope is that in Cata, it will be possible for ferals to have a single gear set that is usable for both tanking and dps. While many of the feral druid leather pieces in Wrath were usable for both feral builds, I always felt that I had to have two seperate sets. A tanking set with +STA gems and defensive enchants, and a dps set with +ARPEN gems, and offensive enchants. Could the removal of Armor Pen, in addition to increased overall health pools and the reductions in base avoidance make AGI our strongest stat for both tanking and dps? Allowing us to consolidate more gear pieces into both sets.

I really don't mind having to change out some pieces for each spec. I would be really happy if I could have a base set of leather items that worked well for both cat and bear, and then had two sets of amulets, rings, trinkets, and weapons that I switch out for tanking or dps.

Does anyone see this as being feasible in Cata? Will +STA or +AGI be the preferred tanking gem for bears? Will +AGI or +Haste be our strongest dps gem?

No, you are right trash aoe dps is pitiful with the huge swipe nerf. But I have regemmed and reforged to resepctive hit/exp caps and pure agi gems. This has seemed to help my dps considerably however it is still considerably lower. I have not been in ICC on 4.01 so I can't comment on DPS within a current raid setting. But I have heard that the 30% buff is not there.

Anon1 -thanks! I'll try; right now feral bears are kind of stupid good compared to the other tanks, but I think that's an artifact of bad scaling.

Anon2 - DPS isn't down that bad by a long shot. It's still down, but it's closer to 20%, and maybe 30% with raid buffs being nerfed so much.

Anon3 - I'll talk about the basic bear rotations and what to expect. Right now potential drain from healers is the least of bear concerns, but I'll bring it up.

Anon4 - I'll try :)

Logique - thanks again for testing so much. You have no idea how helpful that is. I'm concerned about how buffs are going to somewhat hurt ferals; the 10% AP buff was a HUGE gain before, as was the 10% agility boost from kings. Both going away hurts quite a lot, I think. I also don't think the T11 bonus is going to survive a pass; mangle as a booster? Bleh.

I did know about FFF changing - it's now equivalent to sunder armor.

Kosta, when more of the numbers are hashed out I'll look into that. The short answer is that I don't foresee agility being as valuable for bears as stamina is simply due to the bear multipliers on stamina, and I don't see other items replacing stam and armor trinkets any time soon. The enchants are also fairly meh for tanks compared to the tanking ones. You may be able to get away with it to a certain extent, but only just. That being said, it's certainly better than it was at the end of WotLK; with a dps-only stat going away completely, you have agility (which is great for cat and okay for bear), mastery (which is good for cat and bear), crit (which is good for cat and meh for bear) and haste (which is okay for cat and almost useless for bear). Along with hit and expertise. Which means that as long as you prioritize agility and mastery gear, your base gear set should be good. I'll bring it up on the cast.

A bit Balance heavy??? :) I think out of 2 hours there was about 10 min. about bears and cats. It was all interesting I'll grant, but really not a lot of Feral information. It was nice of them to all take the time to do that however.

I was a little shocked how much resto balence versus bear cat discussion there was also. I guess cat hasn't changed a ton compared to the others. Having said that, most of the folks on the podcast were an excellent source of information. There's some really dedicated druids out there and it really makes me want to raid with them. I'm sure they are huge assets to their guilds.

p.s The new bear priority system looks / feels quite difficult. Any thoughts about what you will be doing (Power Auras?) to easily show your lacerate stacks for a fully charged Pulverise etc..? Some of the Threat Plates mods will allow you to show your debuffs on each individual mob, so that might be the way to for multi-mob tanking perhaps. Are you considering using some of the new Ovale Bear suggestion scripts that Leafkiller and the folks on The Fluid Druid are using?

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.